Facsimile machines for transmitting the images of documents are well known in the art, with examples being disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,604,846, 4,321,626, 4,400,737, 4,623,936 and 5,337,158, all of which are incorporated herein by reference. Generally, a facsimile machine transmits a document one page at a time The facsimile machine optically scans the document and converts the image(s) thereon into signals in digital form, usually referred to as a "bit map". These signals are prepared in a facsimile format and transmitted via a standard telephone line to a receiving facsimile machine. The receiving facsimile machine uses the received facsimile signals to reconstruct the original image and prints out a copy of this image.
Present facsimile machines operate much like a simple telephone. The user that wishes to send a document uses the facsimile machine to first dial the number of the receiving facsimile machine and wait for the receiving facsimile machine to answer. The pages to be transmitted are then fed through the facsimile machine one at a time by a facsimile feeder and all pages are scanned and transmitted. Then, the telephone connection is terminated and the facsimile can be used again.
With present facsimile machines, difficulties are encountered in sending multiple documents to multiple facsimile machines. Since the phone number of the receiving facsimile machine must be entered manually at some time after the preceding document has been scanned, a person must be physically present when one document has finished being scanned and another document is to be sent. This person must then present the new document to a facsimile feeder and enter the telephone number of the document's destination. If, for example, two documents must be sent to different locations, the sending party must wait for the first document to be scanned before entering the destination phone number and presenting the second document to the facsimile machine. Valuable time is lost when many large documents are to be transmitted by the facsimile machine, e.g. in a department with many employees and few facsimile machines. Moreover, often a copy of the same document needs to be transmitted to several different locations. It is highly inefficient to send document copies to multiple locations by repeatedly scanning the same document for each copy.
It would be advantageous to have a facsimile machine which does not require human intervention for dialing phone numbers nor for associating different documents with destination phone numbers. It would also be advantageous to have a facsimile machine which simultaneously accepts multiple documents for transmittal, then transmits each separately to the appropriate destinations, without the need for human intervention in dialing phone numbers or associating different documents with different destination phone numbers. The present invention is drawn toward such a system.